Genocide in service of Nakba 2023

The ongoing genocidal war on Gaza is not about Hamas or the Israeli captives in Gaza. Israel has more strategic goals for this war, which it reveals and normalizes in installments. In so doing, Israeli officials are banking on the fact that the enormity and widespread nature of the crimes committed will serve as the perfect cover, if not distraction, for such goals to materialize. 

One goal was crystal clear from the beginning: widespread destruction and industrial-scale slaughter. The Israeli Prime Minister invoked passages of scripture that describe exacting revenge on the Amalek, thus promising genocidal violence and destruction. This was complemented by a plethora of officials vowing to “eliminate everything in Gaza” and turn it into “a city of tents” while others normalized the promised slaughter by systematic dehumanization in which Palestinians were called “human animals”, and “children of darkness”. High-level officials, including the Israeli President, even went as far as saying that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza.

Another goal for this war is advancing Netanyahu’s objective of squashing Palestinian ambitions for statehood. Although promising the U.S. administration that Israel had no intention to occupy or control Gaza, Israel now says it will maintain indefinite “security control” over the enclave.  

Relatedly, the Biden administration said that a “revitalized Palestinian Authority” would take over Gaza after the war. Netanyahu pushed back immediately, accusing the toothless PA of supporting terrorism and inciting hate. On cue, the White House adjusted its messaging and agreed the PA was unfit to govern Gaza. 

For the Israeli establishment, this is not related to the PA’s deep legitimacy crisis but rather to ensuring that there is no unified Palestinian governance of the West Bank and Gaza no matter who is in power. This objective was outlined in a leaked document prepared by the Ministry of Intelligence that views any Palestinian governance formula as problematic, likely due to the assumption it would encourage Western capitals to push for political dialogue.

To justify his opposition, Netanyahu talks about the “deradicalization” of Gaza after the war. The desired outcome, also outlined in the leaked document, is a Palestinian population that accepts its oppressor after undergoing a “transformation of consciousness” akin to the process of de-Nazification in post-war Germany. 

Such a “goal” resonates with Netanyahu’s allies in government, who continue to brand Palestinians, including those in the West Bank, as Nazis that must be crushed. 

Israeli officials talk of a prolonged war that will last months and entail shrinking the tiny enclave by imposing large depopulated “buffer areas” in northern and eastern Gaza. Despite rhetorical pushback from the Biden administration and the European Union, Western leaders are now engaged in discussions about this issue. 

But Netanyahu’s most strategic goal is depopulation and ethnic cleansing, which is being implemented in brutal but deliberate stages. 

First came starvation and siege. Israel cut off water, food, fuel, and medicine to Gaza. Instead of rejecting this war crime, world governments have normalized and legitimized this criminal policy. They adhered to Israel’s choking siege on humanitarian assistance in which it decides what and how much assistance enters Gaza after initially cutting off water, food, medicine, and fuel supplies. 

Almost concurrently, Israel ordered 1.2 million Palestinians and international humanitarian agencies to leave northern Gaza, accompanied by a relentless campaign to completely obliterate health services there, making the area completely uninhabitable. 

The ground invasion of the south is the second, more brutal stage. Hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people have been ordered to leave Khan Younis and head to Rafah as the eastern and central parts of this large city are carpet-bombed. Desperate, terrorized, and hungry, tens of thousands are heading to Rafah, where they know there will be no shelter, food, or water for them.

As recently revealed in an investigation, Israel is deliberately applying “civil pressure” on the population by targeting civilian “power targets” that wipe out entire neighborhoods and result in wholesale killing. This obliteration is deliberate. It is not happening by accident, exposing claims of Israeli attempts to spare civilians as a cruel farce.  

This pressure serves the goal of complete forced displacement or at best, the “thinning of the population in Gaza.” Netanyahu has tasked Ron Dermer with formulating the plan to this end. Even if full expulsion is not attained, the plan foresees that large portions of the population in Gaza could be pushed into Egypt or given a chance to flee to the sea. This planned ethnic cleansing is being normalized and even pushed as a humanitarian solution. In the United States, senior U.S. lawmakers have reviewed plans to condition aid to Arab countries on their absorption of Palestinians from Gaza, to the delight of rightwing racist policy pushers like Daniel Pipes. 

Today, the vast majority of the population in Gaza is displaced and on the brink of famine. Amid international inaction and outright complicity, humanitarian agencies are at a breaking point, unable to meet the overwhelming needs of this Israeli-engineered cataclysmic crisis.

In such an environment, ethnic cleansing becomes almost inevitable, with the ongoing genocide in Gaza used as a means to that end. Rhetorical and toothless international concern is inconsequential. That’s why, absent a change in this lethal trend, Israel will continue to advance its Nakba 2023 objective in installments while garnering piecemeal international support or acquiescence in the process.